One For All and All For One

I was recently reading an essay by sociologist and comics scholar Casey Brienza about the rise of American manga titled “Books Not Comics: Publishing Fields, Globalization, and Japanese Manga in the United States” (first published in Publishing Research Quarterly.) Most of the essay is an interesting discussion of the format rejiggering by Tokyopop which triggered the manga boom in the U.S. However, at the very end, she broadens her net a bit to focus on the implications of globalization in general.

This is the great tragedy of globalization. Although globalization has changed the world in which we live dramatically, there are places within our interior worlds that even those outward changes cannot penetrate. There is an irreducible distance between different people and different cultures that globalization cannot bridge. Much of manga’s “cultural odor,” to borrow a term from Iwabuchi, is preserved intact on the level of content. But as the manga field migrates into the book field, and manga became just another category of books, like cookbooks, science fiction, or biographies, actors throughout the field will slowly lose their ability to detect that odor at all. Therefore, even though we may all be looking at exactly the same pictures and reading exactly the same prose, there is no positive guarantee that, when we do so, we are seeing anything else besides our own, forever-separate selves reflected back at us.

For Brienza, cultural imports do not change the importer; instead, they themselves are altered. Manga doesn’t make America more Japanese; instead, America simply swallows manga and turns it into plain old bland American books.

In Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the Center of Taste, Carl Wilson observes the same phenomena of cultural adaptation…but he sees it as a positive, not a negative. In discussing Celine Dion’s global appeal, he notes that she has to be marketed carefully and specifically to each global region. Instead of creating a one world of Dion, she has to change herself to fit each niche. Wilson writes:

Now a successful artist has to figuratively become local by fulfilling entertainment conventions in other parts of the world. It is less homogenization than hybridization of cultures. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse of the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague writes, “How do we come to terms with phenomena such as Thai boxing by Moroccan girls in Amsterdam, Asian rap in London, Irish bagels, Chinese tacos and Mardi Gras Indians in the United States…? Cultural experiences, past or present, have not been simply moving in the direction of cultural uniformity and standardization.” He suggests what we’re witnessing is a “creolisation of global culture.” It does not follow that creolization will take a standard form. Localism is ignored, as Celine’s marketers know, at peril. Likewise the global hegemony model presumes there won’t be reciprocal cultural influence on the West, but the counterevidence is all around us: Asian video-game music, for example, is arguably among the most pervasive influences on young pop musicians now. And as Pieterse points out, with the exception of isolated indigenous groups, civilization and hybridization have been synonymous for centuries.

Canadian singer Celine Dion and Japanese signer Juna Ito

So where Brienza laments the hybridization and adaptation of borrowed cultural objects, Wilson celebrates it. Where Brienza experiences a loss of manga’s unique cultural smell, Wilson argues for the joyful blending which results in Asian video game music taking on an altogether new odor in an American context.

The Western ducks discover a historical landmark that the Disney Arabs were incapable of finding on their own and what naturally follows their act of discovery in a foreign land is their immediate sense of ownership (Christopher Columbus much?). Furthermore, we as readers are lead to believe that the pyramids do not possess inherent value for their historical and cultural significance, but only for their ability to hold potential treasure. You see, without this treasure it wouldn’t have been worth digging out the pyramid, not worth hiring the cheap Arab labor. Lastly, we see the popular trope of Pharaonic culture being used as shorthand for all of Egyptian culture. In other words, traveling to Egypt for the Ducks is traveling into the past, not into a different contemporary culture.

Ultimately, I believe the real harm of this story is that it was tucked within the pages of a comic’s magazine that had Mickey wishing young readers Happy Ramadan or celebrating Mawlad on the cover. Mickey was localized insomuch as he could help Disney sell more comics globally, extending their commercial reach deep in to an emerging comic’s market. To be an avid Miki fans means to be an avid internalizer of the importance of capitalism and hence a way of seeing the world that makes certain countries first and others third. Mickey Mouse certainly has a big place in the history of Arab comics, but I believe it is a history whose depth we must challenge and whose psychological harm may be immeasurable.

Against Wilson’s joyful vision of hybridization, Nadim sees the same old hegemony. And where Brienza mourns the fact that cultural objects don’t change people, Nadim mourns the fact that they do. For Brienza, manga is altered so much that it loses its foreign flavor; for Nadim, Uncle Scrooge is given just enough foreign spice so that Egyptian readers can be poisoned by it.

So is globalization bad because it does not make us more alike? Is it good because it does not make us more alike? Is it bad because it does make us more alike? Or (as a possible fourth position) is it good because it makes us more alike?

Or, to put it another way, is the world better if people are more alike or less alike? And how does globalization affect that?

Philosopher Alain Badiou argues that these are the wrong questions. In his book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Badiou insists that, in terms of the movement of global capital (both economic and, presumably, cultural), homogeneity and diversity are not in opposition. They’re the same thing. Wonderful hybridized Arab Mickey and sneaky Mickey hegemon are not opposed — they work together.

Our world is in no way as “complex” as those who wish to ensure its perpeturation claim. It is even, in its broad outline, perfectly simple.

On the one hand, there is an extension of the automatisms of capital, fulfilling one of Marx’s inspired predictions: the world finally configured, but as a market, as a world-market. This configuration imposes the rule of an abstract homogenization…. For capitalist monetary abstraction is certainly a singularity, but a singularity that has no consideration for any singularity whatsoever: singularity as indifferent to the persistent infinity of existence as it is to the evental becoming of truths.

On the other side, there is a process of fragmentation into closed identitities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies fragmentation.

Both processes are perfectly intertwined. For each identification (the creation or cobbling together of identity) creates a figure that provides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory of territories…. What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this upsurge — taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so-called cultural singularities — of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs. And these infinite combinations of predicative traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth! Each time, a social image authorized new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls… (All italics are Badiou’s; ellipses are mine.)

So, for Badiou, Celine singing first in Spanish then in Japanese is not a sign that hegemony has been defeated. It’s simply the flip side of the universalism of capitalism; the reduction of every individual soul to a marketing demographic. Similarly,a truly Egyptian Mickey Mouse (or truly Muslim superheroes) would not resist the logic of Western hegemony; it would simply reinscribe the identity of “Arab” on which (with all other identities) Western hegemony depends. The world is one giant bland glob, but not because, as Brienza would have it, we our trapped in our own national identities. Rather, it’s because all identities are the same identity. The lack of smell when you read manga is not a product of Americanization. Rather, the lack of smell is the result of the fact that an identity based on reading manga, whether Americanized or not, is an identity that it entirely permeable by the market.

So if, for Badiou, homogeneity and heterogeneity are the same thing, what exactly is the alternative? Well, among other things, I think he’d probably like us to ignore “culture” all together (he has acid things to say about the flattening of “art” into “culture.”) But more than that, he argues for the primacy of the Event.

The Event for Badiou is something like a miracle and something like a paradigm shift; Paul’s revelation on the rode to Damascus is his exemplar. Subjects do not experience or create the Event, rather they are created by it, and remain subjects to the extent they keep faith with it. Childbirth makes you a mother; having your mother shot makes you Batman. The Event, and your continued investment in the event, is who you are.

In the wake of the Event,individual differences are neither obliterated nor homogenized. Rather, they are accepted without being fetishized or even especially emphasized. So, for example, in Twilight, whether a vampire is white or black, male or female, is unimportant, not because those differences vanish, but because the vampire’s subjectivity is created by the Event of the transformation.

Neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female in vampirism.

Similarly, Badiou points out that for Paul whether Christians were circumcised or uncircumcised made no difference. Thus, Badiou argues, for Paul, Christianity was not a sectarian identity among many, but an insistently universal human subjectivity, available to all through faith in the Resurrection, rather than through coercion or insistent self-demarcation. (Badiou, presumably, hates the Inquisition and Christian pop about equally.)

Badiou’s formulation raises perhaps as many questions as it answers. As just one example —how can you tell a sectarian identity from a universal one? Aren’t the vampires in Twilight themselves essentially a subculture? Isn’t Christianity an identity? Moreover, Badiou bases his whole thinking on idea that the Event constitutes Truth — but his paradigmatic Event is the Resurrection, which (as an atheist) he insists is false. So how exactly do you tell if the Event is true? And if Christianity was not universal because it was true, why was it universal?

Still, arguing with Badiou is, I think, a helpful corrective to arguments about globalization, which can slip rather quickly into disputes about the ideal purchasable cultural product. For Badiou, such managerial fiddling at the marketing margins is a depressing simulacrum of utopian thinking. If we’re going to dream, why not imagine a world where our souls aren’t for sale — where, as Bert Stabler said in a recent comment, “everyone can create shared institutions that aren’t niche markets or normality factories.”

24 Comments

Eh, I wouldn’t worry; I think the hand-wringing over cultural globalistion is way overwrought.

I’m old enough to remember the cries of ‘coca-colanisation’ of Europe from the ’60s; never happened. Another example of American so-called cultural imperialism in France was McDonalds; but, in fact, by adapting to French culture and expectations, McDonalds France became by far the most profitable outpost of the emperor of burgers.

In the early ’80s, when TV was being deregulated all over Europe, there was much doomsaying about how popular and cheaply purchased shows like ‘Dallas’ would overwhelm local creations.

Never happened! Quality local content always beats overseas shows in the ratings.
American shows such as ‘Six Feet Under’ or ‘The Sopranos’ triumph abroad not because they’re American or cheap competition, but because they are excellent.

Count on every local culture to sift the Global Hegemon through its own filters!

My point though (via Badiou) is that trumpeting the triumph of local cultures over the global hegemony is just another way of kowtowing to capitalism. Hegemony and diversity are not opposing ways of looking at globalization; they are complementary.

Sifting capitalism through local filters does not make something that is not capitalism.

The collapse of communism, in various ways, is generally cited as the reason to just give up on worrying about capitalism. How I learned to love the money…

People love to celebrate local cultures. That’s what Carl Wilson was doing. I like lots of cultural products too. I think pretending that it’s some sort of stop to global hegemony is overly sanguine, though.

“It’s simply the flip side of the universalism of capitalism; the reduction of every individual soul to a marketing demographic.”

Except isn’t this universalism of capitalism itself globalisation? Forgive me if I’ve not grasped the point (probably the case), but Badiou is effectively arguing that globalisation, and all of its apparently hegemonic or diversifying effects, are a result of the universalism of the global market no? At the least he seems to equate capitalism and globalisation rather too easily for my liking.

Its just I would want to position capitalism as a subject of globalisation, rather than its cause. Otherwise capitalism becomes some sort of universal constant, which I have problems with. (All credit to you for writing something I think I understand enough to disagree with.)

Well, Badiou is a Marxist, so capitalism ends up being not unlike a universal constant in some ways….

I’m not absolutely sure I understand Badiou either (his prose is relatively clear, actually, but the ideas are tricky.) I think, though, that he’s saying that our particular globalization *is* ineluctably tied to capitalism. The universalism we’ve got it the capitalist universalism of money, which erases individuality of souls and substitutes the irrelevant differences of demographics.

What he wants instead is a universalism based on faith and commitment to the Event…which for him I think would be the revolution (rather than the reincarnation.)

I abviously feel your pain here Noah (obviously since you quoted me and everything). As I mentioned privately, my lukewarm views on civil rights and integration were pretty much altered by talking to you.

The issue is what qualifies as resistance within capitalism (like equality and identity movements, which are both morally upstanding and friendly to capitalism) and what qualifies as resistance TO capitalism (political nationalisms and religious transcendence both offer glimmers, although both are clearly open to bad extremes, and both are clearly “co-opted” in the U.S.).

I will say that I don’t think capitalism can be bracketed off. I would love to be convinced otherwise, but, as I’ve described it elsewhere, capitalism is the motivational structure of modernity.

@Noah, thanks for that, yeah I got the impression that was the assumption he was making, though like I say I’m not too comfortable with it. Interestingly his idea of faith based universalism sounds similar to some of the original ideas of the Islamic economic philosophers. They ended up struggling with most of the same objections you mentioned.

@Bert, I dont think I’m saying capitalism can be bracketed off, but there’s a certain laziness in equating it with globalisation. Just as there is with equating globalisation with economics (which may well just be a restatement of the above). Globalisation as an increased interconnection between people was obviously driven by capitalist impulses, given the dominant philosophy of the then-hegemon. But surely now we have a large degree of non-capitalist behaviour that is pro-globalisation? Artist collaboration, international charities etc. I guess I’m just saying that the relationship seems more complex than simple equivalence or extension.

To relate that back to Badiou, I think I just have a problem with his terms, it seems more like he’s arguing against the globalisation of capitalism than against the basic idea of globalisation (which wouldn’t preclude his faith based universalism). Now I come to it, its a pretty pedantic criticism.

Capitalism eats boundaries for breakfast, then lunch, then dinner, and that takes about the amount of time as a photon traveling from your iPhone to your iBall. Then it does it again, over and over, all the time.

Nothing human can stop it. To relate it to the comics crowd: “Not wind like a watch, but wind.. like the air.” I really wonder about the new Platonists, and how their Power Point projections of deterritorialized essence within the cave of capital.

I would absolutely not say that Jesus is the only possible answer. But Jesus is a real answer. “Something sort of like what Jesus would be if we had the stomach for it” is not a real answer.

Let me jump in to the discussion: So the easy point is of course capitalism reigns supreme, but I take issue with the “so what?” response people have to that fact. Put differently, what gets lost in conversations of globalization is our personal relationship as consumers to the forces that move cultural products to begin with. When globalization couches something like Imperialism (which is what I feel I will be arguing on this site like a broken record) that is dangerous business!

Another way about talking about “The Event” is as a “Point of Origin” (as Said puts it in “Travelling Theory,” a wonderful essay about how ideas move through time/space) which often gets obscured when cultural lines are blurred in the name of capitalism. For example, we have things like the keffiyeh in American culture as a hip fashionable thing you can buy at Urban Outfitters, but consumers of that product not knowing — or more pressingly not needing to know — that this scarf is tied to a specific Palestinian history. This happens time and time again, more recently with hipsters and Native American headdress. When we say, “So what, Capitalism is unstoppable,” we risk absolving our involvement in the harm that Capitalism produces.

Why I want to take the time to contextualize where things come from (as with Mickey and Suberman in the Middle East) is to do my small part towards creating conscious consumers. My stance boils down to: I don’t think we can defeat Capitalism at this point in history, but at very least we can educate ourselves in an effort to become the most critical consumers in that system as possible.

And now that I’ve read it…that’s a really fun essay. I’m not sure how easily Said’s point of origin can link up with Badiou’s Event…I think Badiou anyway would have problems with turning his time into space. He really is trying, in his materialist way, to find a transcendent eruption into materialism, and moving that from time to space doesn’t work so well….

Also, it’s interesting that Said really doesn’t see original intent at the place of origin as necessarily moral or correct, as far as I understand him. Rather, he seems intent on not allowing ideas to be reified…so in some ways the movement of ideas from one area to another, and the subsequent resistances and friction, is for him a good thing….

I used to have a pretty unabashedly positive view of cultural hybridization and the free flow of cultural products. Things started to shift with me when I had it pointed out to me by some fellow (white, of course) radicals that my big ol’ mohawk was an appropriation of Kanien’kehá:ka Mohawk warriors’ hair, a significant cultural symbol. As with the hipster appropriation of the keffiyeh and Native headdress, “tribal” tattoo and other examples, the problem seems to be that the cultural product is delivered without any information about its significance, and without even a suggestion that there is an informed choice to be made about a sensitive cultural matter. The market delivers these things simply as “styles,” producing an incredible disconnect between the consumers of cultural products and the people whom their choices impact, and perpetuating the idea that there is no ethical or unethical choice to be made. A headdress simply shows up – perhaps Deleuze would say “miraculates” (or am I misusing that term?) – on the surface of the market. The chain of cultural interaction and effect is hidden.

So now, stripped of a bit of my white kid naivete on these matters, I’m trying to find good ways of judging the appropriateness of cultural appropriation or influence – which is as frustrating as the interplay of cultures is complicated, of course. So much for easy solutions…

I’ve got one side of my head shaven now – a reference to my previous ‘hawk without being a ‘hawk, a sort of unhappy compromise, not really a solution but with the benefit of being a recognizable signifier of queer culture (in the US, at least).

Ethical cultural consumption and interchange feels a lot like, say, ethical eating – you embrace an eating practice to cut down on the amount you’re contributing to global warming, but it turns out your practice, to which you have sacrificed many of the tasty meal choices you would have otherwise been able to make, just shifts the energy consumption from one input to another instead of reducing it, or does what you hoped it would, but supports the awful treatment of some workers somewhere in the process. Either way, you may never know; the system is too complicated to really fully parse. You’re left making these choices within the strictures of the capitalism in which we’re all trapped, at any rate, which makes the difference between “ethical” choices the difference between a small band-aid and a larger one. They’re both vastly insufficient to heal the wound.
Damned frustrating.

I think too that there’s an impulse under capitalism to shift ethical choices to consumer choices; that is, ethics can become about what you buy (as in dietary choices, for example) rather than part of some sort of coherent ethical system or statement of faith (as I think Badiou would like.)

Actually after reading most of the comments above,especially Mr.Nadim Dumlaji s, i want to make few humble points with some FACTS about all the talk about Imperialism/ globalization/Cultural integration..especially what concerns the Arab World ??! I was born in Beirut/LEBANON in 1947. of an Armenian origin,but very much interested in The Arab Culture especially EGYPTs , Don t know why ,,maybe it s fate?! and I LOVED it to bits, but one has to be honest to one s conscience and to HISTORY of things,Isn t it? Now let s talk about the Arab Press , A) /lEBANESE PRESS/ IT suffered immensely under the Turk Ottomans rule ,from mid 1800s to mid 1920 s , via witch hunt,detentions, and worst of all.. executions,mostly by Hanging! Many writers /editors flee the country to nearby countries and most print houses were owned by the churches then,so when the French came to Lebanon ,most papers were in french, readers were elite section of Lebanese public, as this is fact no one can deny it,our moslem brothers and sisters then were oppressed by many aspects of social circumstances and means of progress of the time .. and mostly illitrate, only few rich ,wealthy ones were able to send their kids to American/French/British sponsored Unis. or
Colleges, but French was the prime language to get employed or study any higher education or profession , Arabic was only street/market language ..or as a matter of fact the common persons means of expression, by 1943 Lebanese independence changed most of all that… and ARABIC dialogue became a virtue and not a shame, or a sign of inferiority?! with nations recognizing this independence ,embassies started to flourish in Beirut..but things didn t stay ROSY for long ,as the Lebanese Arabs expected, by 1948 & as Israel became a nation,neighbouring Lebanon..and a wave of instability hit the region ,and as the cold war was stretching its roots in the Middle east, Western And Eastern embassies and their Arab allies embassies began to sponsor/bribe and even buy publications and open trendy print firms for Propaganda purposes?? an Press War Begun in The 1 st democracy in the Middle East..L E B A N O N / So as you detected tens and tens of new political parties created by all communities/minorities including the Armenians ,who started their own papers/mags. Beirut in the 1940 s 50s 60s became a haven for any publisher who had few Dollars or Lebanese LIRAS to join in and an oasis for exiled Arab journalists,so what i am implying is that independence supposed to be a blessing.. but it was Misused , and Harmed the country a lot..since.,…even its echoes are still heard.. TODAY?! // //If you dear reader of this email want more realities about this and other subjects connected to this subject ..do not hesitate to blog and ask The HOODED UTILITARIAN TO ALLOW ME CONTINUE?? ,THANK YOU IN ADVANCE. Isahak Barsoumianm /London